PRBC Gift Guide – Last Minute Virtual Gifts

It happens to all of us – you’ve forgotten to get someone a gift and you’ve just realized it. You could brave the stores, but you’d like to survive and the thought of dealing the street traffic, much less the stores just makes you wish you could curl up and do anything else … even billing.

Well we’re here to rescue you we’ve got two freemium services that you can buy for your “loved” one right now, let them try out the free service for as long as they want and when they need to take it to 11 they’ve got your lil gift ready to go!

First up, ToDoist – Looking for a perfect gift for that busy person who seems to be a direct blood relative of Forgetful Jones? Consider the gift of a year of ToDoist Premium as a gift this holiday season. At just $29 for an entire year, it’s well worth the price. It integrates with your email, iCalendar, and more to make sure you never miss a deadline. You can create subtasks to tasks inside a project, making it easy to set milestones to ensure everything is being completed on time. Want to give it a try before purchasing? The free version of Todoist is amazing, too. It lacks the calendar and email integration, but is still a very powerful on its own. With desktop apps, mobile apps, and browser extentions for Chrome and Firefox, there is no room for excuses for being unorganized anymore.

And for that person who keeps notes at multiple locations and uses multiple devices – you can’t beat Evernote. This little site can be used as a desktop app, through a web interface and has apps for the major mobile platforms (iOS and Android most definitely). The beauty of this little gem is the constant access to your notes even if you wrote them on your desktop and need to access them at a client event. If you’ve got connectivity you can get to them. Files attach with ease and you can even write up new notes when not connected to the net through one of the mobile apps. The service also links with Livescribe (review coming later) so that your handwritten notes can be automatically synced to your Evernote notebook. The free version does have some limitations (notably smaller upload limit (1 GB vs. 60 MB, better offline notes (though that’s also doable in the free version), better collaboration, etc.)) but is still a must-use in its own right. The $45 per year premium though should blow it out of the water (yep – I (PRCog) am still using the free version a few years into using it).

And with that we’re off until 2014. Have a safe and happy holiday season from all of us here at PRBC!